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skade88 points out comments from Blizzard exec Rob Pardo, who says the company has internal builds of Diablo 3 running on consoles. It's been known for months that Blizzard has been working on something like this, but now we have the first indication of how far along the project is. Pardo said, "We're still kind of exploring it. We've got builds up and running on it. We're hoping to get it far enough along where we can make it an official project, but we're not quite ready to release stuff about it. But it's looking pretty cool." According to lead designer Jay Wilson, we'll start seeing information on "the next big Diablo thing" next year, which probably refers to an expansion.

Nehack isn't far off, really. Diabo 1 started as a "rogue-like with graphics". Somewhere along the way they discovered that it was a lot of fun to make it realtime, not turn-by-turn, but it still had a lot of the same feel - especially when everything moved at exactly the same speed, so you'd see very familiar patterns when a room would aggro on you.

Diablo 2 divereged far from rogue/nethack, by the simple addition of variable monster speeds, and monster AI. I remember that was my favorite thing when D2 w

you know that "blizzard" encompasses multiple studios with multiple dev teams, yes?you know that companies are in business to make money, right? That they don't exist just to give you stuff?

Diablo 3 is a decent game, and continues the story well. It only really has two big problems: no shipping pvp, and replayability. (if you say story, you can frag yourself; people bitched about D2's story too...how quickly people forget what they hated and label it "classic" down the road...soon the same will happen to D3

"Titan Quest - Immortal Throne" also feels more like a true spiritual successor to "Diablo II" as well. No "online only" requirement in single player, auction house, RIDICULOUS difficulty curve, or other needless mechanic that degrades the overall experience. I will have to check out "Path of Exile" sometime as well. I stopped playing Diablo III once I got to the "hell" difficulty and never went back again.

The game is lacking core functionality that it was suppose to have at launch, or shortly thereafter, such as PvP. They are working on porting this to consoles instead of adding features they promised players? I guess they are trying to milk this cow dry before it dies. It is really a shame, Diablo II was one of my favorite games of all time. Diablo 3 is embarrassing.

Which means Activision's money whoring ways would trickle down to Blizzard sooner or later. Kotick's treatment of games as products and nothing more ensured the eventual quality erosion of Blizzard's games. I'm pretty sure that the devs get bonuses based on revenue and sales, so they are probably pitching right in to wring every last nickle out of their customers. Sad to see another highly revered game company throwing away quality for $, too bad the money pile is obscuring the cliff on the other side.

Don't be an idiot. The people porting it to console likely don't even possess the same skillset as the people working on PvP (one is low level hardware programming and optimization and control design, the other is level design, game design, and scripting). Also, PvP in Diablo games was always tacked on and terrible. At best it just enabled griefing for 14-year-old assholes.

The people porting it to console likely don't even possess the same skillset as the people working on PvP

So? If they weren't working on porting to consoles, they could have hired more PvP-oriented devs and less console-oriented ones. If there were no opportunity costs in porting, every game would be released for every platform.

You haven't thought about your viewpoint from a financial perspective much have you? They won't be working with a fixed amount of cash. The console porting is an investment into gathering more revenue from console sales. The money to hire console porters comes from that investment return (- risk, - profit). The increased revenue from adding more features, like PVP, increases even more if they can sell more copies - like to console gamers as well. It's plausible that the development of a console port gets th

You haven't thought about your viewpoint from a financial perspective much have you?

Well, no, because I wasn't responding to a financial question. The GP was saying that spending time one consoles had no opportunity cost, when it came to developing PvP. That's false.

Whether it's overall a financial win for the company, or whether - over the longterm - both features can be developed more efficiently by doing both is irrelevant to the GPs point and my argument. Assuming limited resources, any feature developed comes at the expense of other features - even if they require different skills.

But resources are limited by the potential for profit. The higher that potential, the more money that can be invested. There is obviously a limit but this is in the context of a > $10 billion dollar company.

Which only goes to reinforce my point - there is a relationship between investments in feature A and feature B. Whether it's positive like you suggest (feature A produces enough money to then produce feature B) or negative like I suggest (cost of feature A precludes timely completion of feature B), the two are not completely distinct like the GP suggested. Also note that it's possible that we're both correct - feature A produces money used to create feature B, but feature B's release was still delayed by th

Given the current state of diablo, it's not terribly surprising which they opted for. If you do ever get that core functionality, expect it to be bundled in the first payed Expansion Pack. Hell, it might be the entire XPac. PvP now on sale for $50... you can pay with your Real-Money AH proceeds, from which we already pilfered 15%. Also expect the XPac to include items 1% better than everything currently in existence, just to start

Lack of PvP is not a deficency.It keeps the screaming whiney kiddos affected by the "I have a bigger e-peen than you, faggot" syndrome away, directly rerouting them to other games.Heck, the more I think about it the more I appreciate it.

Other than that yes, game has flaws. Even important ones.And I don't think porting to consoles will solve them.

Lack of PvP is not a deficency.It keeps the screaming whiney kiddos affected by the "I have a bigger e-peen than you, faggot" syndrome away, directly rerouting them to other games.Heck, the more I think about it the more I appreciate it.

Indeed. PvP is usually a bigger deficiency than the lack of it, because it's almost always implemented in a completely broken way - flavors of the month, overpowered classes, skills, weapons, et cetera. It gets even worse in MMO/RPG-type games, because the very nature of PvP means it affects PvE and vice versa. You cannot balance combat between players and combat between NPCs against each other. It does not work; it has never worked; it never will work.

In past Diablo games is that that choice was not left up to you, it was left up to the other players in the same game as you. I once heard someone lament there should be a force PvE option similar to the force PvP button because "if the griefers can force me to play their game I should be able to force them to play mine."

I don't know about the lateste couple of games, but older games were C, C++ and OpenGL, o there wouldn't be much issue porting them to linux. Heck, they've even made OS X ports for some of them, so porting to *nix shouldn't be too much work.

I hope it's a rather small subset of their employees that are exploring this console thing. The game needs a lot of work to be even close to its full potential, and I would think their time would be much better spent working towards that.

One wonders what Blizzard's excuse is for this. It's not like they're some fly-by-night studio that's under distributor deadlines to "get this out by Christmas or you're all fired." They have the time and the money for development to "take as long as it takes." Instead, they're playing the exact same "release now, patch later" game everyone else does.

Most likely they actually thought it was a good game. Internal feedback and a beta test aren't the same thing as what happens when millions of people hit it release and get pissed off. I mean it's not like the game was lacking in terms of polish, it's just that what they had wasn't all that fun.

Time doesn't always give you a better product, just look at Duke Nukem Forever.

Hey, I really liked DNF! I don't know here all the had comes from: it was a simple corridor shooter with 3-breated aliens. What else did you expect? Admittedly, it missed its chance to be the first "and you drive monster trucks" game, but hey, monster trucks.

Agreed. Back at launch they were mentioning how surprised they were at the effect the auction house had. Internally they had something like a few dozen people playing it, so the auction house had a very limited pool of items, and as a result was fairly insignificant. Fast forward to a week after launch and they were completely blindsided at the massive effect the auction house had on itemization. On the one hand I feel like they should have seen it coming, but on the other hand, complex, dynamic systems are

Meh, anybody who expected a bugfree, perfectly balanced game at launch never played a Diablo game, Diablo 1, Diablo Hellfire, Diablo 2, and Diablo 2 LOD were all bugridden and unbalanced at release and for the first few patches. Heck the first three never really achieved any sense of balance and LOD only kindof got there.

You have me tempted to fire it up again...but it's hard to muster the interest at this point. It's not that I disliked the game (in fact, I loved it at first), it's that it just got very boring very quickly, to the point where I had almost no energy to do anything after beating normal mode.

110% agreed. Sadly, it's pretty obvious that the game before patch was basically meant to milk people on the Auction House.

The game-as-shipped had massive "stealth nerfs" to everything that wasn't raw damage/defense at higher difficulties (this was later documented in their online manual, but the in-game tooltips still falsely displayed the same values regardless of difficulty). In other words, the only way to succeed was to have the best gear... which unlike play skill, could be purchased on the Auction Ho

I've run two characters are far as Inferno with no farming, and gotten three more through Normal. (I have one of each type.) I have never been to the Auction house, and get through the game on things I buy, build, or find. Didn't even get to level 60 on the two characters until into Act 4 at Hell level. It takes me this long is I'm married and have a life, and can't spend 24 hours a day playing it. Plus I'm a bit of a dungeon crawler, seeking out every last monster to slay and every cave and cellar to explo

I love the game ever since Patch 1.0.5 addressed the stealth nerfs, but at this point Guild Wars 2 has stolen me away and I've pretty much forgotten it. It was a good 40 hours of having a blast at lower difficulties, though, so I can't say it wasn't money well spent...

Have you only just gotten into Guild Wars 2 or something? I ask genuinely, because ANet really, really appears to be trying to do the exact same thing. There's some sort of divergent development disorder going on, where the content team makes changes to make the game more grindy (which is fine with me, I actually like grind), while the "balance" team makes constant nerfs, stealth and overt, to anything that people are grinding in the pursuit of the first set!

The infernal machine is annoying. Key drop rate is abysmal. 100 runs, one key. And you need 9 of them.... (3x3)
Seriously. The infernal machine is not worth it.
You need to make hundreds of runs for the nine keys + one plan, buy a ring plan for 2 million gold, kill three times 2 uber-boss monsters at the same time.p>

You do realise that the drop chance depends on the monster level? At level 5 the chance for the key to drop is 50%. Without setting a monster level, the chance is only 5%, so of course that will take ages unless you are blessed by the rng gods....

And for what? One shitty ring that can't be sold with stats that are laughable, terrible, to be polite?

The important stat of that ring is the 35% experience bonus, which you dont get on any other ring (except one, but it's low level with terrible stats). So with the hellfire ring, you will gain paragon levels much quicker. Plus there really is a chance that it roll

In my own experience with Diablo III, in the thirty-or-so hours I gave it, I never once got a loot drop that I thought was excellent. I bought most of my equipment on the gold auction house -- no real money involved -- and it allowed me to pretty easily stay ahead of the curve. At the same time, I didn't sell anything that way; it was just easier to sell every half-decent piece of loot to the shop.

Maybe the worst decision they made was to make the auction available to just anyone. It totally bypasses the

Got the game for PC the first week. I just wanted to play it on my machine but they made me create an account on their website. Then I tried to play the game...but then I had to login and there was a problem with their login service. Then I was able to login, they made me change my password to something with upper and lower case, and numbers. Now that I couldn't remember my password and had it written down somewhere inconvenient I could finally play...which I did for a whole weekend. Then I stopped pla

My problem is that it is a single player game that requires you to login, and it has enforces a level of password complexity that requires me to use a non-memorized password (for what reason? So somebody can't play it on my machine?), and their implementation is unreliable and locked me out for god knows what reason. They've made it such in annoying user experience that I'd rather not play. I don't have this much trouble with the MMOs I play, why should be such an ordeal for a single player game?

I knew it required a battle.net login. I just didn't think it would be such a hassle to login. Am I crazy to think that if I install a single player game on my secured computer, that I should be able to play it without having to worry about getting locked out inputting the wrong password three times? Our network at works locks your login at 3 attempts. Why would battle.net have the same level of security? It's pointless.

And why don't we do this... all of the applications you have installed on your box should require a unique password with letters and numbers, and they all phone home to gigabyte sized updates. You can login to windows, wait for the update. Then you can login to your browser...wait for the update. Then you can login in notepad...wait for the update. Login to Word,...oh shit you screwed up the password 3 times...now it's disabled and you have to call microsoft and answer a bunch of security questions so

So at some point in the future console users might get to share in the joy that is the most disappointing release of 2012. And the RMAH scam, but only after paying Microsoft for an Xbox Live subscription for the privilege, of course.

Honestly, Diablo 3 just wasn't that good of a game. It'd have made a lot more sense either without the AH at all, or without the $60 pricetag and with the AH as the monetization tool.

I really liked this game when it first came out. Didn't have a ton of time to play but made it to Act 3 Inferno right as they decided I should be punished. Nothing like logging in one day to find repair bills were so high that you couldn't afford to repair. Sell everything you have and still have broken pieces of armor. Brilliant idea making a player decide whether they'd rather make another character in order to farm the money needed to repair your favorite character or just uninstall. Haven't played since

Guess I wasn't very clear before. I wasn't having trouble in Act 3 until I logged out one day needing repairs and had 10k on my guy after making some gems. A week later I come back and the normal 10-15k repair bill was over 50k. Sure I could have begged for the money. Or made another character and farmed the gold. I chose the spend my time playing something route.

20 hours is what I call "a good short" 40 hours is more the average.....some games can easily hit hundreds, but they tend to be RPG's. Time is finite, so for adult gamers with jobs...shorter is better if they want to play more than one game.

Console games have years of gameplay becasue they're designed primarily to be fun rather than a timesink/content consumption mechanism like a PC game. Consider how much gameplay people got out of Mario or Sonic, compared to a PC game where you just watch cut-scenes for hour after hour until you get bored and uninstall.

There was always speculation that Blizzard planned this from the get go, and it shows through the inherent design decisions made. The extremely limited and streamlined skill system (tailored almost perfectly for a buttoned controller), the complete focus on having 4 players (controllers) centred on the action, the auto way pointing and lack of free roaming, the console style matchmaking system, and don't forget that practically every console user has their credit card details attached to their consoles thes